Sunday

My Wishlist: Better Facebook Metrics


There have been rumours that corporate Facebook pages are changing and become more like profile pages. For some brands with a heavy FB presence, this is exciting news. There's nothing worse than the infinite scroll down content that you don't really care about. The tab system on pages will help to streamline content and allow brands to create more immersible pages with much more content.

A collegue of mine asked me to put together a list of my 5 dream Facebook metrics. While I know that there are privacy issues around some of these ideas, as an advertiser, it would be exciting to have access to some enhanced information about page interactions. Here are my top 5:

1. Page Metrics that go further than the click - what tabs are the most popular and what are users actually doing on them? (ie. The Wall vs. Events, etc) How does tab position differ in terms of impressions (ie. being on the landing tab vs. second vs. fifth in the navigation.) Most importantly, Facebook does not currently show time spent or bounce rate on anything. These two metrics are critical to determining engagement with the page. It's one thing to say "we had 12 wall posts!", quite another to show that the average time spent on the photos page was 10 minutes.


2. News Feed comment tracking / aggregation - now that groups are becoming more like profiles, changes and interactions will be broadcast into the news feed - a huge bonus for brands and viral impressions. As a result, users will be able to comment on those news feed updates. Those comments can tell a brand a lot about sentiment. For example, if Audi uploads new photos of a car to their fan page. Are users going to respond to them as "those our cool" or as "this car sucks"? Tracking all comments could lead to solid insights about users.


3. Unique Return Visits - I have a strong feeling that people join brand groups initially (due to an incentive / contest) and never return. How many users are net new vs. current fans and how many are returning on a regular basis? Facebook always talks about the power of a fan but if that fan doesn't care about any of your page updates, what good are they other than a name on a list?


4. Viral News Feed Impressions - one of the biggest selling points of corporate group profile-like pages is that updates / interactions are broadcast into a users newsfeed. That's great. But how many people are being shown this impression? Right now we can manually see but there is no metric to show the total amount of viral impressions that have been created through news feed updates. It's always surpirsed me that Facebook doesn't share / track this metric. It's the power of their service - the viral impression - and they don't even share the number.


5. Fan Segmentation by Influencer Ranking - said another way, I want to know who are most popular fans are and be able to target them. Who has over 1000 friends? Who is our top person by friend network? Can we get in touch with them for special offers? Or the top 10%? Or users only in BC or another location? All facebook users aren't equal. Those with bigger networks can spread their messages to a larger group and we need to do everything to engage them.